Essel Propack, a manufacturer of laminated and plastic tubes has six plants in India and 17 others, spread across the globe. The company’s aggressive growth plans include doubling its revenue to $500 million by the end of 2010. Keeping in line with its inorganic growth strategy, the top management is looking to its IT department to supply the thrust necessary to drive this aggressive growth.

Zoeb Adenwala, CIO, Essel Propack, explains, "Our management perceives IT as being one of the main enablers in trying to double revenues in three years. I was brought in about four months ago to chalk out a strategic IT road map and help achieve this business goal."

BI As The First Step

Essel Propack had a lot of data residing in a heterogeneous environment spread around the globe. In addition to the large volumes of data, there were problems with multiple versions of the same data. "If I asked ten people for a certain sales figure, I would end up with ten different replies. We wanted a system that could give us a more transparent view of the data residing in our solutions. In addition to that we wanted data that we could trust and base our decision making upon," says Adenwala.

Thus the immediate need was for a Business Intelligence (BI) tool to harness the potential of the volumes of data possessed by Essel Propack and present them in a user friendly format. In addition to presentation of data, there was the need for proactive decision making, which a BI tool would enable.

Adenwala explains, "We didn’t want to undertake a large implementation like Business Objects or Cognos. The need for a solution was immediate, and the goal was to get better visibility of our processes, to enable proactive decision making." Thus the idea was to avoid a lengthy implementation that would require massive investments and go in for a quick implementation, which would produce immediate benefits.

Familiarity instills Confidence

Responding to questions regarding choice of the BI solution, Adenwala states that having implemented the 1Key BI tool from Maia Intelligence during his previous role as CIO, Pidilite Industries, knew that the same solution would do the trick at Essel Propack.

In keeping with the scorching pace of growth, Essel Propack went into a short two week pilot of the 1Key solution in late September. The pilot involved samples from three business areas - sales, manufacturing and finance, and the CEO, Sanjay Bhasin, in its execution. "The same data was transformed in to a much more user friendly form in a short period of time and hence we decided to go ahead with the roll-out of the solution," states Adenwala.

The implementation, which started mid-October, is planned to be completed by the end of December. "This is one of the few installations in which the rollout has been at such a scorching pace. Projects usually take from 6 months to a year but for the first time we will be done and out in 3 months," says Sanjay Mehta, CEO, Maia Intelligence.

"This implementation will target the Sales, Finance and Manufacturing areas as visibility in these areas can provide the best decision improvement leading to better business performance," states Adenwala.

The solution runs on an Intel Xeon server, which runs on the Windows platform and utilises MS SQL on the backend.

"Clean Data" major Challenge

The biggest challenge in a BI implementation, according to Adenwala, is to get clean data. "In any global company there are multiple sources of data, which are residing in the company’s various solutions. In all our entities globally, we have about 3 ERP packages running and the data is available in different formats. Thus the challenge is to collect data from these various sources into one data warehouse and in one format. Thus, the data warehouse design is of utmost importance."

Proactive Management - The Goal

Immediate benefits expected are better visibility of data to the power users. Where they now practice reactive management with the help of 1Key BI solution, users have forward visibility of data. This enables them to identify areas which could become pain points in the future, and then take proactive decisions.

The second benefit is the power to do a lot of "what if" and slice and dice analytics. This will give the users the ability to churn the available data to give them a better sight into pricing of products, the how, what and where of sales strategies and SKU management.

Along with this, the solution will be used for forecasting functions and trend analysis.

Essel Propack plans to migrate to the web deployed model of the 1Key solution, when it is released in January.